Europe is opening borders while we're closing them

At midnight Friday, fireworks lit up the sky at the border between Poland and Germany. Beethoven's Ode to Joy was played as officials and citizens celebrated the joining of nine new countries to Europe's border-free zone. Now it will be possible to travel from the Russian border in Estonia to the Atlantic coast in Portugal without encountering a single border crossing. This lifting of barriers between people in Europe comes just as American officials are making final plans to lay hundreds of miles of steel fencing along the Texas border with Mexico. The contrast between the approaches of Europe and the United States to borders couldn't be more stark.

The opening of the borders in Europe was celebrated for good reason. The elimination of border posts and passports to travel between the countries of Europe is rightly seen as symbolic of the elimination of the old fears and hates that led to so many European wars over the centuries. It's difficult to harbor ancient suspicions about other peoples when just a few hours traveling takes a European from Italy to Norway without so much as a pause at a border.

The border-free zone grew out of an agreement in 1985 between Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and Germany to abolish border posts between them. The zone took the name of the village in Luxembourg where the countries met, Schengen. On Friday, the Schengen zone expanded to include nine more countries, including those that once stood behind the Iron Curtain: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Their eastern and southeastern borders now mark the furthest definition of what is called Europe.

The extension of the Schengen zone is not without risks. Not a member of the Schengen club, the British fear that asylum seekers will now have a quicker and easier path to the English Channel. Though hundreds of border guards backed by new high-tech surveillance equipment now line the eastern edges of Poland and Slovenia, some Europeans believe the expansion has gone too quick, leaving the continent vulnerable to criminal elements and illegal immigrant waves.

The same fear has driven the United States to present to its southern neighbor the face of a steel fence, a structure placed at the Texas border where cultures, language and trade have historically mixed. Canada, Mexico and the United States may be called one name, North America, for purposes of trade, but not in the case of people. Unlike Europe, the United States has put its faith not on the free movement of people and cooperation with neighbors, but on a metal structure and more border guards.

The Schengen zone, however, treats all Europeans as members of a single nation. The Schengen zone recognizes that Europeans have more things to connect them than to separate them. The Europeans have chosen to embrace their similarities rather than their differences, a sentiment that used to be nurtured by Americans before they chose to let fear take the upper hand.